FAST Channels – Quality not Quantity

FAST Channels – Quality not quantity.

So many companies are making channels with some companies having more than 100 channels which are all unwatchable or uninteresting.

FAST broadcasting has opened a few opportunities to launch channels with a few hours of content and assume that the channel is going to be watched by millions of people. The reality is a little more real, if the channel does not resemble traditional TV and if the content is not what people want to watch then it will have low traffic.

At $0.15/hour gross earnings for content owners is a high number but the only cheap channels which have succeeded have been funny videos and movie trailers which ironically are great content that cost very little to obtain.

FAST has produced a lot of dreamers who think they can build multi-million-pound channels but also to content aggregators who think that producing 100+ FAST channels from content deals resulting in 50/50 of profit with little outlay would be a good business proposition.

Ironically, the latest Top Gun film exceeded the number of views in one weekend than most fast channels would cover in 100 years of broadcast.

Content is King, producing multiple channels from content which is available on revenue shares is not the way forward on FAST, it is all about the quality, exclusivity, and value of the content not the quantity of channels.

Jukin Media produced several rich channels which resulted in a great return, 200 people working a few channels is obviously the route forward.

Current fast channels earn 50/50 from the platform following a 20% revenue share from the advertising agencies, stooping to 65% average ad-break fill-rate followed by $0.01/gb CDN and $1.50 SSAI fees. All these solutions once integrated are paying channels 10-15% of gross revenues due to the unfair deductions of the other ecosystem participants who all have a fraction of the commercial and reputational risk, this is not a content repayment model which can be sustained or even applied to FAST First content models.

We can make an assumption that the average FAST channel needs to have 20-25 hours of unique content per week with the ability to repeat this content on a monthly basis. The Churn rate on a FAST Channel can then be assumed to be 80 hours per month with a turn over every 3 months so an annual channel could function on 300 hours per year.

Based on 300 hours per year and the average niche content production, commission or acquisition each hour of content needs to be covering an average cost of $15k, $6m per year in content and approx $1m in technical and management which is similar to the calculations used for You Tube creator channels.

$7m dollars cost on a FAST channel clearly shows that it is impossible to state you are running 200 channels of quality with World Poker Tour

Cloudie TV working with Addressably and Kapang have produced an efficient model to channel content owners seeing more than 60% of the revenues earned with 80-100% ad fill rates to provide a sustainable return on content investment for broadcasters.